Cloud gaming firm Shadow makes its first acquisition: Android emulator maker Genymobile

Shadow runs a cloud computing service best known for cloud gaming, plus a cloud storage offering built on Nextcloud, from France.

Genymobile, a French startup more than a decade old, specialized in low-level Android development and built a popular emulator letting developers test apps across configurations and scenarios.

Genymotion expanded from desktop subscriptions to a hosted version and cloud-platform deployments, letting CircleCI or GitHub Actions trigger automated tests on every build; Shadow launched a business service renting high-performance Windows Server VMs with GPUs to gaming studios, 3D animation companies and other GPU-hungry industries.

On 2023-01-20 Shadow announced its first acquisition, buying Genymobile for undisclosed terms. Co-founder and CTO Arnaud Dupuis takes over as Genymobile's CEO from March 1; incumbent CEO Tim Danford steps back to an advisor role.

It is a related diversification: the acquisition adds a second machine type — Android devices — to a cloud business built on Windows gaming VMs.

It extends Shadow's B2B push, which began with the recent business cloud service, into developer tooling.

Buying Genymobile imports a decade of low-level Android expertise instead of rebuilding it from scratch.

The machines a company already runs can serve a second, steadier market: gaming PCs became GPU cloud, and now Android devices in the cloud for developers.

As of 2023-01-20 the deal is announced with terms undisclosed; Genymobile's leadership transition takes effect March 1, and Shadow plans to offer Android virtual devices in the cloud alongside its Windows Server business VMs.